Our Insiders are the smartest people in the aviation industry – so we like to introduce them to each other, and to our podcast listeners and blog readers. Today, we’re talking about aviation software marketing with Ken VeArd, the developer of the Pilot Partner software. Pilot Partner is an electronic pilot logbook – I’m in the process of converting my paper logbooks myself!

Aviation software marketing is a little different than marketing any other kind of software, and it certainly helps that Ken is a pilot who developed the software for his own use, before polishing it for other pilots, flight schools and flight instructors.

In some ways software development is kind of like marketing, you can only really be successful if you first understand what your customer wants and needs!

Today, we’re talking with Ken VeArd, the developer of Pilot Partner, and an ABCI Insider.

We always say that our Insiders are the smartest people in the aviation industry, and Ken is a real live software developer.

So, it all started in 1997 when a software developer, Ken VeArd, showed up to a local flight school to learn to become a pilot. Before his first solo, Ken was frustrated with his paper logbook and knew there had to be a better way. He started developing his own Software Database to track his own flight. Ken built it just for himself and never thought about making it public. His instructor, Carl Lindberg, saw the program and said, “This is pretty good, you should clean it up and sell it.” Pilot Partner was born. Over the next couple years Ken continued to upgrade Pilot Partner and sold it on several aviation related shops. Over 2,000 copies were sold. So, I asked Ken to pick up the story from the basics.

Ken VeArd: Basically, from a high level, I started writing software for my dad’s company while I was still in high school.

Then spent a lot of time at different dot coms in Austin, Texas, and just really working on different technology for my entire career. But I have always been an avid general aviation pilot as a hobby. And now we’re looking to marry those two things together into a profitable business that brings value into other general aviation pilots.

Paula Williams: Fantastic. So how do you find Austin actually, that’s the place that we’ve spent a little bit of time because John was stationed at Fort Hood for a couple of years.

Ken VeArd: My dad ran a company out of Austin, I moved here when I was three months old so I didn’t have much say in that move [LAUGH] Right when I started college, when I started high school, my dad wanted to set himself up for retirement and move to Florida.

So we packed our bags and moved to Florida. So I finished high school and college in Florida, spent eight years out of Melbourne, Florida. And 2000, I decided to come back to Austin, to get back into dot coms, and there’s more technology here than there was in Florida. So I made the move back.

Paula Williams: There you go. I remember the “Keep Austin Weird” bumper stickers and those kinds of things.

Ken VeArd: Yup.

Paula Williams: That’s kind of cool.

Ken VeArd: Yeah, they are successful. Austin is still weird.

Paula Williams: That’s fantastic. Great, okay, so after moving back to Austin, did you start flying at that point or were you already?

Ken VeArd: I actually started flying in Florida.

Paula Williams: Okay.

Ken VeArd: So right when I was in college, starting college, my parents made it, gave me the opportunity to do something. They just wanted me to pick up some sort of passion or hobby, something constructive, and I chose flying. Which I had a real interest in first general aviation experience where one of my dad’s friends was a GA pilot and he brought his plane down to take us for a ride in it.

I didn’t think anything special of it, I went like hey that’s a pretty red airplane let’s go for a flight. Got hooked and really enjoyed it and got out of the airplane, and walked into the flight school and decided that I wanted to sign up for flight lessons.

And my flight instructor had this look in his face, and I was like what’s that? He’s like you just got out of a Beech Staggerwing.
[LAUGH].

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] That’s fantastic.

Ken VeArd: I had no clue how special that opportunity was. And I wish I could go fly in that plane again, cuz I’ve never been able to get back into a Beech Staggerwing, in a frame of mind that I could really appreciate how special that was.

Paula Williams: Man, remember your roots kid!

Ken VeArd: Yep.

Paula Williams: That’s fantastic and then well actually I remember my first flying lessons were in Georgetown Texas so that was a pretty familiar territory. There’s a lot of aviation and a lot of general aviation in Texas.

Ken VeArd: Yep. Austin is a hot spot for general aviation, and it amazes me how active the local pilot community is.

When we say hey, I’m gonna go to insert airport within 16 miles from here for lunch, one day we had 60 something airplanes show up.

Paula Williams: Wow, that’s fantastic. Well your parents were really smart what the saying if you get your kids involve in aviation they’ll never have money for drugs or alcohol or anything else.

Ken VeArd: Yup It is very true.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] That is true.

Ken VeArd: Aviation is just like crack cocaine just far more addictive and far more expensive.

Paula Williams: Far more expensive that’s true, and I know there’s a story behind Pilot Partner. You basically got frustrated with the logs that were available at the time.

Tell us about that story.

Ken VeArd: So when I first started taking my private pilot lessons, I decided that I wanted to log my flights electronically, because I’m a brand new software developer working for my dads company. And I first went and looked around what little internet there was at the time to see if there was something that could do it for me.

And there’s one or two options that were just not as full-featured as I wanted. So I decided to write my own database application, and I wrote it for me. I didn’t write it from the standpoint that I was gonna make a software package out of it. But I started logging in it and get the business logic in it so it calculate my currency and this is about the time I was starting to sell well.

And then I showed what I did to my flight instructor and goes, this is really good you should probably polished it up a little bit and try to sell it I bet people will buy it. So I was too young and naive to know that that was a tough thing to do, so I went ahead and did it.

[LAUGH] And I started selling it, I found a couple aviation like magazines that are online shops that were interested in selling it in their store, so I worked out a deal with them. And back then in 1997, it was one of those things where I would get an order, and I would pull out four blank floppy discs, put them in my drive, copy the files to it, put the label on it, put it in an envelope and mail it to whoever just ordered it.

It’s a whole foreign concept to what goes on today.

Paula Williams: I remember loading software that way. That kind of shows our age there, [LAUGH] but [LAUGH] That’s cool.

Ken VeArd: And actually, my last trip back from Florida, I stopped in Louisiana for fuel and dinner, and there was a King Air pilot there I started talking to.

And of course, I mentioned, hey, you should try out electronic log books. And he’s like, I did way back in the day, I used it for a long time, and I finally had to give up on it. And I started talking to him, and I was like, this is sounding familiar.

And it turned out that he was one of my original customers from back then, that he bought it. And he thought it was funny because he’s like, yeah, I got the disks in the mail, and it was from some town like Indialantic, Florida. I was like, yeah, that’s where I lived and sent it to you.

So 20 years later, I ran into a customer who used my software for a long period of time, it was pretty interesting.

Paula Williams: Wow, aviation is a small world.

Ken VeArd: Yep.

Paula Williams: So, yeah, as you went through this, and you started marketing, of course, you got a little bit more sophisticated and things like that and ran into possibly some other folks who were in the business.

What are some of the advantages of Pilot Partner, and did you plan those, or were those happy accidents?

Ken VeArd: Well, Pilot Partner, the new iteration of Pilot Partner that started about two and a half years ago, started from the core of what the original Pilot Partner was. And it actually amazed me that after I had 20 years of experience as a software engineer and really understanding how to properly do the engineering task that you need to do.

That I definitely didn’t understand back in 1997 as a college student that my design remained remarkably similar to what I original did in the original Pilot Partner. So the first feature set was almost an exact clone, just make it web-based and Cloud-based software instead of a locally installed database on your computer.

Of course, I set out to make it more scalable and handle more users, and all those things. Then I started thinking about, all right, we can’t just reinvent 20-year-old technology and sell it. What is the value add? So what features, because we are cloud based, can I do now that the old platform would not allow me to do?

And since there’s a lot more competition now, what is it that other software packages are not doing that I can do differently and better? So then, I went to work on some of those features, and the first thing that we did is put together an integrated aviation blog.

So with Pilot Partner, every flight that you do, you can turn on an editors that will allow you to write a blog about that flight, and then post it online. And we did some work to make it SEO-friendly so that Google search engine will see your blog post, and you can control some of the keywords that it looks like, and things like that.

And then integrated it with Facebook to make it really easy to share that post on Facebook. So that was the first new feature that we did, because we’re online, that no one else was doing is making it social friendly.

Paula Williams: I love that part because you can share slides if you want to, and then you also showed me how you can make sure that your images and other things are private as well.

So you can either share them or not, as you see fit, and I think that’s really an important feature of that product.

Ken VeArd: Yep, you’re gonna find there’s a theme with Pilot Partner about the privacy of log books. Because talking to so many different pilots, there’s a wide range of different opinions on how private people wanna be with their log books.

Some people don’t care. It’s like, yeah, I’ll write my log book on the side of the wall next to the highway, and everybody can see it. And other people think it’s top secret information that no one should be able to see, and I don’t think there’s any real rationale between being on either end of that spectrum.

So in Pilot Partner, you’ll notice that there are different safeguards that enable public sharing, and none of the information will be publicly available unless you choose to do it. And you’ve got different levels you can do it, whether sharing a specific image or sharing a portion of your blog that you type in.

And then only summary information on that flight get shared, but regardless of what settings you choose in Pilot Partner, the actual contents of your logged flight is private to your account only.

Paula Williams: Got it, that makes perfect sense. That’s a great feature. Any other differences between Pilot Partner and the other folks out there?

Ken VeArd: So the big one that we really spend a lot of time focusing on is what we call the CFI dashboard. And because we are a web-based tool where selected data can be shared amongst other people, since all the data resides in one place, we have this opportunity for a flight instructor and a student to formalize their relationship inside the log book.

And the student can allow their flight instructor to actually have access to their log book to see all the flights that they’ve done, where they currently stand in their training, and improve that instructor-student relationship. So then, we added a tracking system on top of it, called the aviation training dashboard, which takes the ACS standards.

The Airman Certification Standards that the FAA published about a year ago now, and turned it into what we call a board where you have four different columns. Not introduced, introduced, progressing, and ready for check ride. Each skill that you’re required to demonstrate on your check ride is listed as an individual card.

And your flight instructor, or yourself, depending upon the security permissions that you choose, you drag them across that progression at the different columns until you get all those columns into the ready for check ride column. Then your instructor in signing you off for your check ride. And I firmly believe that if used properly, an instructor and a student can more efficiently do a training program and probably save anywhere between one and five hours of flight time to earn a private pilot’s license, saving the student a lot of money.

Paula Williams: Exactly. I was looking at that and going back over my logs from a million years ago when I got my private, and I spent a lot of time that I did not probably need to stand because I would go with different instructors because of the way my schedule worked.

And the last instructor didn’t necessarily know in detail. Of course, there’s a big white board at the flight school, but I think we probably spent at least 10, 15, maybe 20 hours easily on some different skills that I didn’t need to have spent. Just thinking, this would have saved me so much money in that initial training.

Ken VeArd: Yeah, so you take that same experience, and if you had Pilot Partner available to you, what you would do is you’d have your first flight instructor that you’re flying with would actually be making detailed comments about each flight and each skill that you’re working on inside of Pilot Partners.

And then when you change instructors, you would just Add them to your log book and grant them access to your logbook, and then your instructor can review flight by flight all those detailed remarks to see exactly where you were. Reference the aviation training dashboard to see specifically which skills your, have been working on and where you stand and pick u without taken very many steps backwards.

Paula Williams: Exactly, that’s fantastic. Any other differences that you wanna talk about?

Ken VeArd: The list has gone on and on with the different things that we do. Really, the last year we’ve been focused on creating a long list to answer this question. We’ve done a lot with the social media sharing, and I’m a firm believer that sharing different flights, and flight summaries on social media is very important.

It’s not, a lot of people feel that It’s very selfish, is a very selfish act when you share on Facebook that I just did this flight. You’re just trying to show off. But, a finders a much more important aspect to that for all the aviation community. That when you share in Facebook, several of my shares that I’ve done have inspired people who weren’t thinking of even becoming a pilot.

And they would reach out to me in a private message saying I keep seeing these fun adventures that you do with flying, and I see your social media post and your blogs that you post about flying, how do I get started. And I know of two to three private pilots today who got their inspiration from a social media post that I made, and with the decline in numbers that a lot of people talk about in the general aviation community.

It’s a small thing that each of us can do to bring new pilots into the community.

Paula Williams: That’s fantastic, because in a lot of cases kids don’t get exposed to aviation like they did years ago because they don’t have access to the airports, and the pilots in the cockpits when they’re on an airliner.

There’s a dozen things that you can’t do. Today that you could’ve done five or ten years ago and one of the things that you can do and just like you said, this is not a narcissistic thing, this is how people share now, because you can’t share in those ways, right?

Ken VeArd: Yeah exactly, and not everybody has a Beach Tiger Wing to come down, and pick you up, and take you for a ride and get you hooked.

Ken VeArd: It is, I do feel it is every pilot’s responsibility to help groom the next generation of new pilots.

And that’s why I’ve spend so much time in doing the social media sharing. We’ve started at the end of 2016 with a year in review graphic that every pilot gets automatically generated based upon the information in your log book and it generates a nice infographic of. Some interest and statistics if you’re flying.

And we’re about to continue this tradition, and April 1st we will be running another version of that for the first quarter of 2017. We make it super simple to click a button, share it to Facebook, it’s optimized for Facebook and Twitter. And you share it and it will tell you things like how many hours you’ve flown that year, how many different aircraft you’ve flown, what was your longest day of flying and how far did you cover it.

And even my own infographic, when it came up, it was some interesting statistics that I hadn’t even thought about, and a paper log book would never tell me that.

Paula Williams: So, there were some surprises there.

Ken VeArd: Every time I slice and dice data in a different way then my log book, I’m always finding surprises.

Paula Williams: Right, so just like a Fitbit can make you run more, [LAUGH] Using this can make you fly more, maybe try some new things.

Ken VeArd: Absolutely, I ran my insurance report after I developed it, and I looked at it. And one thing it tells me how many hours with an instructor have I had across different categories.

Including how many landings have I done with a instructor on board? And I looked at it and realised only had one landing with an instructor in like the last 12 months. And I started to thinking to myself, am I doing everything that I should be doing as a pilot, to stay current and do that continuing education that I feel is important.

So, it inspired me to go find an instructor to go fly around with me for a little bit, and help me push my limits. And help me practice those things that I don’t do on an average flying mission.

So I have to ask you, and this is something that we’ve actually been advocating to a lot of folks doing marketing in the aviation industry, is the subscription model. And of course your software really lends itself well to that, how has that worked out for you? Have you ever tried selling anything not using a subscription model or what’s the difference in your mind?

Ken VeArd: So, the original version of Pilot Partner was a one time fee, you purchase a piece of software and it gets installed on your system, and it’s your forever, and we offered free updates. I think if I ever did a major version, I was gonna charge a little bit for it, but never got to that point.

And then, in my professional career, I’ve done all kinds of different price and models and worked with all kinds of different setups. But, primarily subscription has been what I have specialized then, and I whole heartedly believe in a subscription model. But in the aviation community I find it to be a specific challenge, because the aviation community has condition themselves to getting things for free.

Which I find is a very interesting observation considering how much money goes into aviation, and how expensive every little thing is then all the sudden you come down to. Yeah, the value add of your log book and have them advance in analytics and at the end of the day your entire career is captured in your log book, it’s one of the more valuable things that people have.

And if I were to still someone’s log book it would be devastating to most pilots, and they expect it for free.

Paula Williams: Right.

Ken VeArd: So, and there are some providers out there that are providing various level of quality log books for free. And they a lot of pilots just say that’s good enough for me.

And then, I ask well do you ever think about the person providing it for you, and what it cost them to provide it? And what it cost them too maintain it and keep it available to you? If it’s free, what’s in it for them? Why would they put new features and updates and maintenance in their priority list to keep your log book which is very important accessible to you always.

Paula Williams: Right.

Ken VeArd: So, and I’m working with the customer right now, who did purchase a log book app out of the app store. And the app is no longer available, it’s no longer supported, and he spent. Months, and turn 20 years of flying into this app, on an iPhone, hand-typing in every flight that you did in 20 years and he contacted me out of the blue and said hey I’m interested in your product but here’s my challenge.

So I helped him kinda get to. We were lucky we were able to contact the original author and he made his data available to him. And he imported it into Pilot Partner. But for a little while, he was afraid that he lost all that data. That he was either stuck on this app that one day wouldn’t work on the iPhone.

And he could not get his data back. So we make sure that your data is always available to you. We have an export option that will export it in a machine readable format that is designed to be imported into a wide range of different options, and this export functionality is available to you even if your subscription is expired.

Paula Williams: Right. I know a lot of the folks in our group, and a lot of the folks that I’ve talked to, would just be nodding in agreement right now, that there are so many things that people expect for free. And I blame [LAUGH] bad marketing. There are so many people that do inferior products and give up on them and then just leave them out in the iPhone store, or on the web in general as downloads, wherever and they don’t maintain things and it degrades the whole community, really, when people come to expect poor quality and come to expect things for free.

So the nice thing, I think about the subscription model is that attract the type of customer that’s willing to pay for a service and that is a specific kind of person that has, usually it’s a person that gets paid for their work, they understand craftsmanship, and they have a really high expectation of you, because they’re paying you.

So it keeps you on your toes, right?

Ken VeArd: Absolutely. And I love that pressure and I love that sense of responsibility that I have, because people are paying money for this service, and customer service is the number one important thing at Pilot Partner, if we have a problem, one, we fix it but before we fix it we communicate with the customer who reported it.

We make them feel that their concerns are important, that we care about that and that we will take care of it for them.

Paula Williams: Mm-hm. Right. Cuz they are paying customers. They’re not just freebie seekers and riff raff on the internet. So that’s a different category of people.

Ken VeArd: And the interesting thing is I have made some really good friendships out of people who initially emailed me for support.

Paula Williams: Wow.

Ken VeArd: And I’ve got one or two pilots from the original Pilot Partner that we stayed in contact with and through this version I’ve already got four or five people who are now in my friends list just because it started with a support request.

Paula Williams: Fantastic! I know sometimes they make the best advocates as well, sell something for them. So what is your favorite marketing activity so far?

Ken VeArd: Marketing, and I’ll be honest, aviation software marketing is a challenge. As a software engineer trying to do all my own marketing, which I’ve been doing for the past year and a half pretty heavily.

Across the board, it’s been a challenge to do things that have measurable results. We spend a lot of time on Facebook. There’s a lot of good Facebook groups that we find unobtrusive ways to make posts. So it doesn’t look like we’re spamming people, but still trying to get the message out.

And I’d say Facebook is a big one. I really enjoy our YouTube channel. I mix our YouTube channel with training videos and we’ve got some people in the aviation history including Rob Mark helped with some voice over work and make the training videos more professional.

But I really like some of the ad-hoc aviation videos that I’ve produced and put on the channel. That’s one of my more favorite spots, and that’s more along the lines of inspiring people, whether you’re already a pilot and get to see something that pilot partners are doing, and maybe that’ll transfer over to someone who wants a log book software.

But also inspiring those new pilots who didn’t think aviation was in their reach but they start seeing these cool things and then they become a pilot and maybe they’ll also become a potential customer of Pilot Partner.

Paula Williams: Great so they find a way to make or make a way and I really like that channel as well because I think you do a really nice mix of here’s some nuts and bolts about Pilot Partner and here is why I fly.

Ken VeArd: Yeah.

Paula Williams: Which is really what it’s all about.

Ken VeArd: Yep.

Paula Williams: So it’s not just the cut and dry, I think people tend to get kind of features and benefits and features and benefits and features and benefits. And that’s not what it’s about. It’s about flying, you know, and getting out there.

So.

Ken VeArd: It helps that my passion before computers was producing and directing live television. So I’ve always had that bug in me about producing video content, I just love doing it.

Paula Williams: That’s fantastic. Yeah, and you can tell because those are high quality videos, as well. So great stuff.

Favorite book. You always like to ask people that even though aviation or, sorry maybe aviation or marketing related or something off the book.

Ken VeArd: You know book wise, with as busy as I keep myself I don’t get enough time to read good books, if it’s a book it’s usually technical manual of some sort or something in the engineering process.

From a software development side, Joe Celko has written a series of SQL books about the theory behind relational databases and some of the challenges there, he’s one of the probably the smartest people on databases that I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. So I’m gonna give Joe Celko a plug here and say this his series of SQL books are my favorite.

Ken VeArd: I don’t want to do anything cliche, like any other software engineer and say Star Wars although that is definitely up there. One movie that absolutely blew my mind and I have watched it probably 20 times and I see something different every time I watch it is Inception.

Paula Williams: Yeah. I had to watch that more than once as well, just to figure out where I was. What level of movie am I in.
[LAUGH]

Ken VeArd: It’s an incredibly well-made movie, and even after, like the 15th or 16th time through you’re picking up on a clue that you didn’t see before, I’m just very impressed with how that movie was written, produced, and delivered.

It was amazing.

Paula Williams: Right, it’s like an Escher painting in a movie.

Ken VeArd: [LAUGH] Yes.

Paula Williams: Cool, all right so I know you just started with our Insiders Group. Do you have any first impressions of that group and how it’s working for you?

Ken VeArd: And so far I’m really just impressed with the whole Overall process of the approach to marketing, since I first contacted you and your company, and the different people on the Facebook group and the Insider’s group.

I’m looking forward to spending more time in some of the other groups settings that you offer but it’s, at first I’ve been a little leery of bringing outsiders in to do marketing. I’ve had a few people offer to do marketing before but knew nothing about the Aviation industry.

I’m a firm believer that you have to be an aviator to market aviation stuff because the industry is just so specific and the techniques that work. And the day to day stuff just don’t always carry over. So, I’m very excited about the industries specific marketing help that this group represents.

Paula Williams: Fantastic, we do have some of the smartest people you’ll ever meet in that group and then privilege to work with you and with them. So when you put great minds together in a room, really fantastic things happen, but yeah, and that’s totally selfish, like I said. Because a lot of people have a weird opinion about sales and marketing so the more you show of the process and of other people in the process, I think the less suspicious people get [LAUGH]

Ken VeArd: Yep.

Paula Williams: Of the industry and things, my gosh you’re in marketing, let me go to the other side of the room and hang on to my wallet, so. Totally understand that sentiment and we’re trying to overcome it but anything we can do to improve our on boarding or experience with you or anything that you’ve seen so far that you’d like to see different?

Ken VeArd: At this point, we’re pretty early in our engagement.

Paula Williams: Yeah.

Ken VeArd: I like the time that you spent. I’ve worked with other companies before, where you get a time to talk and it’s just like, all right, we got 30 minutes. And how quick can we hit the hang up button on this.

Now, I got the complete opposite sense of this, it’s like no we’re in this to win, we’re in this to do great things and let’s make sure we explore at the right level. So, so far, I’ve got all positive feedback. As we start executing on some of the initiatives that we’ve laid for now.

We may have some other feedback but I’m really optimistic and eager to see what results we get from it.

Paula Williams: Fantastic. Yeah, we’re looking forward to moving forward as well. So how can people get hold of their very own free trial of Pilot Partner?

It’s available on any web browser on Macs and PCs. You can also find us on Apple Appstore for the Google Play Store, if you have an Android, so we support both platforms. We do recommend, unlike some of the other apps that are out there, spend time on the web base version on your desktop to get all the events, features and the detailed reports.

And then the mobile version is used for the information that you need when you’re on the go such as log in flights, check-in totals, check-in currencies and doing those types of activities. But a lot of pilots tend just stay only on the app.

Paula Williams: Mm-hm.

Ken VeArd: And they’re missing the whole power that’s behind it.

Paula Williams: Right, and that, honestly, was my first impression when we started talking about what this was. I assumed that it was just an iPhone or maybe iPad app and, until I started exploring it, I didn’t really realize how rich the desktop was. There’s so much you can do with this thing, it’s really crazy.

Ken VeArd: We actually started off with the notion that we would not gonna have a mobile app. And as I have done a lot of mobile app development in the past, and I know how painful it is and how much overhead’s associated with a mobile app. So I optimize the website to work on an iPhone and an iPad, but it just was not producing the feeling and the flow that I wanted.

And one of my partners at the time, Dave Allen, really challenged me to do an app. And I kept telling him, no. We’re never gonna do it. It’s too expensive, too challenging. And then I found a technology that really unlocked the ability for us to provide an app.

I didn’t tell him I was doing it and I went to work for about three weeks without talking to anybody and published the app, and asked them to download it. And I think he fell out of his chair when I sent him the email to download the app.

Paula Williams: Right, exactly. So this is a real far cry from those, just iPhone app that maybe add a few features on the desktop, and go backwards and, that’s why they’re free. [LAUGH] There you go.

Ken VeArd: We built this from the ground up using some techniques and technologies that you’ll find in a lot bigger software shops.

Things that I’ve learned over my professional career in the 20 years that really packs a lot of power behind every action that you do and. The web version and the mobile version, it’s just a window into that power. The power is the logic that’s in the cloud that actually stores and processes all the data for you.

Paula Williams: Fantastic, well thank you for spending some time with us today Ken and I really appreciate you sharing your story with us.